Writing about food: Fran Lebowitz's "Metropolitan Life"
"Summer has an unfortunate effect upon hostesses who have been unduly influenced by the photography of Irving Penn and take the season as a cue to serve dinners of astonishingly meager proportions. These they call light, a quality which while most assuredly welcome in comedies, cotton shirts, and hearts, is not an appropriate touch at dinner.
"Cold soup is a very tricky thing and it is the rare hostess who can carry it off. More often than not the dinner guest is left with the impression that had he only come a little earlier he could have gotten it while it was still hot.
"Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.
"White grapes are very attractive but when it comes to dessert people generally like cake with icing.
"Candied violets are the Necco Wafers of the overbred.
"A native-born American who has spent the entire day in what he knows to be New York City and has not once stepped aboard a ship or plane is almost invariably chagrined and disoriented by a menu that uses the French counterpart for the perfectly adequate English word 'grapefruit.'
"People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand that there must be a reason for this.
"Technological innovation has done great damage not only to reading habits but also to eating habits. Food is now available in such unpleasant forms that one frequently finds smoking between courses to be an aid to the digestion.
"A loaf of bread that is more comfortable than a sofa cannot help but be unpalatable.
"When one asks for cream one should receive either cream or the information that the establishment in question favors instead a combination of vegetable oil and cancer-causing initials.
"Cheese that is required by law to append the word 'food' to its title does not go well with red wine or fruit.
"Civilized adults do not take apple juice with dinner.
"Inhabitants of underdeveloped nations and victims of natural disasters are the only people who have ever been happy to see soybeans.
"Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter.
"If there was no such thing as food, Oyster Bay would be called just Bay, and for the title of 'The Cherry Orchard' Chekhov would have chosen 'A Group of Empty Trees, Regularly Spaced.'"
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